Monday, January 28, 2013

I just came across this amazing talk from Ted Talks. In this video, Margaret Heffernan discusses the academic and organizational dynamics that inhibit progress and positive change, and which are highly relevant to progress and educational equity for men and boys.

Friday, January 25, 2013

Among certain Feminists
in academia, the definition of rape is being broadened to the point of
absurdity, demonizing men and trivializing the experiences of rape victims. We
will cover several such definitions in this post. It is
important to understand this tendency, because when we begin to discuss rape statistics,
we will find that many of the methodologies that ideologically-drive professors
use when they find high a incidence of rape employ broad definitions that most
reasonable people would not label rape.

On page 60 their book The Female Fear, professors Margaret
Gordon and Stephanie Reiger define rape in this way: “The American dating
system, which constitutes a primary source of heterosexual contacts, legitimizes
the consensual purchase of women as sexual objects and obliterates the crucial
distinction between consent and nonconsent.”

I hope that for most of
us, no argument is needed to disprove such a statement. But let us explore it,
to sharpen our critical thinking skills: contrary to what these professors assume,
when it comes to dating, there is no guarantee of sexual services in exchange
for the man’s payment. It is not like walking into a store and giving a cashier
money in exchange for a good or a service which a man could legally sue for if
he did not receive it. And if a man and woman did enter into an arrangement to trade
sex for money, it would still the case that both parties still have a choice.

But what if professors
Margaret Gordon and Stephanie Reiger are correct? What is to be said of the
women who prefer men pay? Are such women rape apologists and rape advocates? And what if a lesbian pays for a date with a
woman and later has sex with her? Is she also a rapist? According to these
professors, no; this concept only applies to heterosexual dating.The professors also say on page 6, “Then
there are the wolf-whistles, unwanted hugs and pinches – what the authors of
one book call “mini-rapes” – which continually remind women they are vulnerable,
sexual victims.” The authors they are
referring to are Feminist Professor Andra Medea and Kathleen Thompson, who
together authored the book Against Rape. To
clarify, if you read their book, you will find they do not describe them as
“mini-rapes” per se, but instead “little rapes.” Medea and Thompson rationalize
defining such things as catcalls as “little rapes” by saying on page 50, “We have defined
rape as forced sexual intimacy.”

This is a very broad
definition, and it is not the legal definition. Intimacy, of course, can mean not
just physical intimacy brought about through touch, but also emotional intimacy
brought about through words. Under this definition, the woman who was raped at
gunpoint is now classified in the same category of victimization as a woman who
experienced the brief discomfort of being told she was attractive in an indecorous
manner.

The idea of a “mini rape”
does not end with the aforementioned authors, however. In a 1994 interview
among Dr. Christina
Hoff-Sommers and Camille Paglia, and Ben Wattenberg, who hosted a show called
“Think Tank” at PBS. Dr. Hoff-Sommers says,

I interviewed
a young women at the University of Pennsylvania who came in in a short skirt
and she was in the Women's Center, and I think she thought I was one of the
sisterhood. And she said, 'Oh, I just suffered a mini-rape.' And I said, 'What
happened?' And she said, 'A boy walked by me and said, `Nice legs'. 'You know?
And that -- and this young woman considers this a form of rape!

These are not the only Feminists
in academia desperate to demonize men and trivialize the experiences of genuine
rape victims by radically broadening the definition of rape. According to Feminist professor
Liz Kelly of London Metropolitan University says on page 41 of her book Surviving Sexual Violence:

Sexual
violence includes any physical, visual, verbal or sexual act that is
experienced by the woman or girl, at the time or later, as a threat, invasion
or assault that has the effect of hurting her or degrading her and/or taken
away her ability to control intimate contact.'

What is rape? Apparently,
to professor Kelly, everything. She makes this more clear on page 350 of the book The Hidden Gender of Law, saying, There
is no clear distinction between consensual sex and rape, but a continuum of
pressure, threat, coercion and force. The concept of a continuum validates the
sense of abuse women feel when they do not freely consent to sex.

Dr. Kelly is an extreme
Feminist. But is she a marginal one? According
to the website of Northumbria University, she is head of the Child and Woman
Abuse Studies Unit at London Metropolitan University, the Roddick Chair of
Violence Against Women, a Commissioner for the Women’s National Commission and
one of two appointed experts by the European parliament to the European Union’s
Gender Centre.” She is, of course, also a professor. She is also the author of
a study which found a high prevalence of rape – surprise surprise. We will
discuss how her biases influence that study later.

A somewhat similar
statement is made by professors Carol Bohmer and Andrea Parrot on page 3 of
their book Sexual Assault on Campus, where they clarify the terms they will use
throughout the book: “Sexual assault is a
general term that describes all forms of unwanted sexual activity."

There are two big
problems with this statement. Can you guess which ones they are? The first is
this: all forms? What all can fall under the general umbrella of sexual
activity? Sexual misconduct in academia, for example, is a broad term that
encompasses sexual assault and sexual harassment, the latter of which involves
not physical assault, but something as simple as words and facial gestures. In
academia, these can all be classified as forms of sexual activity.

The second problem, which
might seem easy to pass over at first – and I ask for your patience if your
initial reaction is to disagree - is the word “unwanted." I myself have
had sex when I did not want to at first because I was preoccupied with
something at the time, as well as types of sex that I did not particularly want to have, but I did it anyway to please my partner. Sexual assault
is not sex that is unwanted per se, but sex that is nonconsensual. There is a
critical difference between the two.

Consent is also an
element in our everyday lives apart from sex. Have people ever done things for
their partners that they did not want to do, but then went along with it
because it made their partner happy? A partner may not “want” to mow the lawn or
go see their mother-in-law on their day off work, but may do it anyway. A
person may not “want” to donate to charity, but may do so after a persuasive
request is made. That does not mean that person’s money was stolen. Not wanting
to do something and not consenting to do something are sometimes – but not
always – the same thing. Language matters, and professors Bohmer and Parrot
need to be more careful about how they use theirs, especially in the section of
a book dedicated to clarifying the terms they will use throughout the rest of
the book.

A statement which is hard
to read without a double-take comes from professor Carol Sanger of Columbia
University School of Law. She says in her article "New Perspectives on Rape" in the Los Angeles Times (April 25, 1991, p. B7):

Consent - agreeing to
something - is usually not a hard concept to understand. It may at first appear
more complex in the context of rape. One reason is simply its unexpected
presence. There is no other crime defined in terms of consent. Only in rape is
the victim asked, ‘Did you agree to it?’ Compare: "Did you agree to be
punched in the face?" "Did you agree to be mugged?

You heard correct folks: professor Carol
Sanger truly believes that normal sexual intercourse is rape. But perhaps I am
being too judgmental of her; perhaps, like professors Margaret Gordon and Stephanie
Reiger, she only believes that heterosexual intercourse, as opposed to all
intercourse, is rape, and that only men are rapists. Unfortunately, she does
not clarify.

But how influential can a woman like Carol
Sanger become in academia? According to her CV, which like many you can now
find online, professor Carol Sanger has been a member of the Executive Committee at the Institute for Research on
Women and Gender from the year 2001‑present, as well as a member of the
Presidential Advisory Committee on Diversity Initiatives. In other words, she
is a gatekeeper on whether or not research she deems acceptable gets published,
as well as whether or not administrators should pay attention to the inequities in
educational attainment among male students.

Far too many Feminists professors believe
and act as if rape (or the desire to rape) is a normal part of male psychology.
For example, Feminist professor Mary Koss, then from Kent State University - says,
“Rape is indeed an extreme form of behavior, but one that exists on a continuum
with normal male behavior within the culture.” Professor Koss is the author of
the infamous “1-in-4” statistic, which we will cover in an upcoming post.

In Professing Feminism, dissenting Feminist professors Daphne Patai
and Noretta Koertge summed up Feminist Professor Catharine MacKinnon’s
perspective on rape by saying on page 129, “In a
patriarchal society all heterosexual intercourse is rape because women, as a
group, are not strong enough to give
meaningful consent.”

While this quote is sometimes misattributed to
MacKinnon, who is a professor at University of Michigan school of law, if we examine her work, we find that this description bears
striking similarity to her views. First, in Toward
a Feminist Theory of the State (page 176), MacKinnon says, “This approach reflects
men’s experience that women they know do meaningfully consent to sex with
them…men and women are unequally socially situated with regard to the
experience of rape.” She later elaborates on page 178: “Under conditions of male dominance, if sex is normally something men
do to women, the issue is less whether there was force than whether consent is
a meaningful concept.”

When it comes to deciding
whether a rape has occurred, if consent is not a meaningful concept, and if
force is not a meaningful concept, then what is? One might wonder, on what
terms does such a Feminist determine whether a rape has occurred? We can
triangulate this based upon her other statements. In her book Feminism Unmodified, she says, “Politically, I call it rape whenever a woman has sex and feels violated” (page 82).

Her statement is
completely unqualified by any kind of context. One might ask: when must this
“feeling” of “violation” occur for it to become rape? And what does “violation”
mean exactly? Does professor MacKinnon agree with professor Liz Kelly that it
could be “any physical, visual, verbal or sexual act that is experienced by the
woman or girl”? People can feel “violated” by all sorts of things – both
actions and words. And with the tendency of Feminists to define words in and of
themselves as the equivalent of physical assault, we cannot assume that their
meanings are as reasonable as we might otherwise be led to believe.

Professor MacKinnon also
says in the same book on page 5, "Feminism is built
on believing women’s accounts of sexual use and abuse by men.” So we know that, according
to professor MacKinnon, there are two necessary conditions for a woman to have
been raped. One condition is that if a woman feels violated – and again, we don’t know what “feeling” and
“violation” mean exactly. And the other condition is that if she merely says
she was raped, then she most definitely was.

MacKinnon’s statement
that consent is not a meaningful concept is rather interesting considering
Feminist politics. If, according to Feminism, “no always means no,” shouldn’t
yes always mean yes? Consider this statement, which is very similar to
professor MacKinnon’s, by Feminist law professor Susan Estrich says in her landmark
Feminist book Real Rape, "Many feminists would
argue that so long as women are powerless
relative to men, viewing
'yes' as a sign of true consent
is misguided” (page 318).

Similarly, professor Carol
Pateman of UCLA says in "Women and Consent," published in Political Theory, volume 8, page 149:

Consent as ideology cannot be distinguished from
habitual acquiescence, assent, silent dissent, submission, or even enforced
submission. Unless refusal or consent or withdrawal of consent are real
possibilities, we can no longer speak of ‘consent’ in any genuine sense.

It is a fundamental
element of the Feminist faith that a woman’s “no” always, inflexibly, and
absolutely means “no;” even if it is said with a teasing and sarcastic tone by a
woman who is at the same time pulling a man’s penis into her. But when a woman
says “yes,” Feminist professors turn around 180 degrees and say that all of a
sudden there are conditions and exceptions to treating the sexes equally - but
here’s the catch: only when they disadvantage men and boys. I am not going to
tell you what to believe in this regard – whether a “no” and a “yes” should
always be interpreted as such. But I will advocate one thing that many
Feminists in academia do not: consistent treatment between the sexes. If we
hold one sex to a particular standard, we should hold the other sex to the
same. And that essence of consistency is what true equality really is.

In these posts we make
heavy use of quotations. And while certain isolated statements are alarming,
there is a bigger picture in this series on misandry that I believe we must not
lose sight of, which is this: the problem is not so much the singular or
occasional questionable statements by certain faculty, administrators, and
sometimes students. The real problem is the attitude behind it. As an example,
professor Medea and Kathleen Thompson declare in their book Against Rape, “Rape is perhaps the
foremost male fantasy in our society” (page 14). Is this a credible
statement? Is it one that acknowledges the humanity and dignity of men and
boys? According to these authors, the foremost male fantasy is not having a
family – the dream of many young men. It is not inventing something that will
change the world, a dream many men began when they started building with Legos
as a boy. It is not saving the world, a theme which is featured in so many
shows that men and boys like to watch; no, according to these academic Feminists,
the primary male fantasy is rape. Is it more likely or less likely that how
these Feminist professors feel about men and boys as a group will influence to
what degree they treat men and boys fairly on an individual level?

When
a university conducts a hearing regarding an accusation of rape or sexual
harassment, the accusations are sometimes adjudicated by a panel of faculty and
administrators. Ask yourself: looking back on the people and the stories we
have covered in this series, if you were a male student attending a university
and were falsely accused, or if you had a son or other male relative attending
who was falsely accused of rape, would you want people with attitudes like
these sitting on those panels deciding whether you or your loved one is
innocent or guilty? I know I wouldn’t.

The professors we covered
in this post are not marginal by any means. On the contrary; they occupy
high-ranking positions in academia. Their works are influential and taught at
the university level. They sit on committees where they decide what views on
men and boys get published, what programs get funded, who gets hired and who gets
fired. They write letters of recommendation to bring into the academic fold
those whose views toward men and boys are similar to their own. They organize
and preside over conferences, where they decide whose work is presented and
whose career gets promoted. Their works are featured in anthologies and other
scholarly publications; they make recommendations for public policy and have
the ear of many administrators, committees, media outlets, and some government
officials.

And last but not least, they teach the next generation to adopt
their attitudes toward men and boys.We will discuss their
influence further in future videos and blog posts.

As an MRA who
focuses on educational equity, I spend a lot of time thinking about how best to
tackle the problems affecting male students. I divide these problems into three main areas: educational attainment, the academic culture, and rights and
protections. Although outside academia there are numerous factors
contributing to the educational decline of boys (fatherlessness ranking high
among them), within academia I believe the root of these problems is the
academic culture itself.

And therein
lies the problem: who can we rely on? Teachers, when not politically hostile to
men and boys as a group, wilt under the prospect of opposing those who are,
especially if they are administrators. At many institutions tenure is being phased out at the same time that misandry is becoming firmly entrenched,
allowing ideologues who have completed their long march through academia to
pull up the ladder behind themselves and keep those with alternative
perspectives perpetually off-balance.

Administrators
are also not particularly known for their vertebrae when it comes to standing
up for unpopular yet ethical views. “Liabilities” is the language they best
understand, a language in which federal funding speaks louder than conscience and
reason. Like faculty, they too are sometimes politically motivated to ignore the
needs of male students as a group. Being the very essence of the status quo,
administrators by nature are highly resistant to change and will employ a wide
array of bureaucratic parlor tricks to ward off those they hope are too naïve, ignorant,
or powerless to oppose them.

They may,
for example, say, “we’re thinking about it” (when they want you to go away), “that’s not my
department” (when it is), “I can’t tell you what we do behind closed doors because
it’s protected by the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act” (often lies), “ “we
don’t have funding for it” (lies), “I sent you an email about it” (lies), or their
secretary may say “she can’t speak with you because she’s out to lunch/sick/left
early for the day/at a meeting” (more lies). I have spent more time than I
would like to count chasing administrators up and down academia, and have
learned from experience to have a healthy skepticism for their explanations.

Students,
when fairly young, are often not overly concerned with political matters, but
can be surprisingly receptive at times. It seems that every other day younger
and younger students are popping up on the Men’s Rights subreddit, talking
about their experiences in school and joining the ranks of those informed by an
MRA perspective. I have more hope for change from students than faculty and
administrators. And yet, students are often subject to the whims of educators
whose idea of diversity, too often, is to oppose the freedom of speech of everyone who politically disagrees with them.

Karma MRA
MGTOW has voiced that one of his main goals in going on poster runs at
universities is to reach the next generation. I believe there is a lot of value
to this approach. We must not only reach out to the students, but also develop
creative methods to shake up academia as a means of making way for them. When
it comes to direct on-the-ground activism at particular universities, I have reached
the conclusion that alumni are best suited for this job. Alumni, having already
received their degree, can confront faculty and administrators without worrying
about their grades or careers. When speaking to students, being an alumnus
grants a degree of authority not normally afforded to your average poster-wielding
activist. If only for the purpose of information gathering, alumni may also have
the benefit of personal and professional networks that many students have not
yet developed.

When conducting
activism in academia, I strongly advocate the covert use of recording devices
in “one-party consent” states (where only one person in the conversation needs
to be aware of and consenting to the recording for it to be legal), and the
publication of that information online when corruption is discovered. In
activism generally, and especially in bureaucratic settings, I advise everyone
to think of recording devices as your sword and shield. Remember that
reputations take a lifetime to build and seconds to destroy. While not as high
a priority as funding, the prospective loss of public image and reputation is still
potent. When used correctly and against the right people, recording devices
effectively nail not only certain faculty and administrators to the wall, but
also the institutions they represent. And when exposed as a liability or made
into an example in front of their peers, the academic castles of certain corrupt
faculty and administrators can just as easily become their prisons.

As some of
you may know, I am an alumnus and former instructor at A&M-Commerce, and
spoke last year with two administrators at that university. In our meetings,
Title IX Coordinator Michele Vieira admitted to joining other administrators in
taking down – not once, but five times - YouTube videos recorded by students of
“outrageous harassing behavior” by professors, that those who made false rape
accusations were routinely not punished, and that she could not tell me that
the preponderance standard the university had adopted was justified when I
asked her. I tried to work with them to change their sexual misconduct policy
to be fairer to the wrongly accused, but when they cut off communication I
submitted an article containing the damning recording to A Voice for Men, where it was published.

As of right
now, anyone who Googles the phrase “A&M-Commerce Rape Policy” will find the
videos, articles and links to the recorded interviews at the top of the search
results. In addition, Googling the phrase “Michele Vieira Title IX” will return
the article at A Voice for Men named “Title IX Coordinator Protects Abuser,
Abusive Policy.” Students at A&M-Commerce who are wrongly accused or
wrongly convicted in a university hearing, as well as their parents, will now
have access to a lot of information describing what goes on behind the scenes -
information they might use in their defense. When submitting the original
article, I mentioned to Paul Elam that the recording and article might serve a
purpose for future activism. And it has.

During the
fall semester of 2012, I made several trips to A&M-Commerce to post flyers
directing students to the online material, and more importantly to talk with
and engage the students directly about what was going on. With my smartphone in
my shirt pocket, camera turned outward, I recorded everything. I directed them
to my blog, which had more information than I was able to publish at A
Voice for Men due to space constraints (such as screenshots of lengthy emails
between myself and administrators), and which also linked back to the article
at AVFM. I have compiled some of the most representative of those recordings
into a video, which is now on YouTube. In listening to their statements you
will hear them say things that may surprise you. They certainly surprised me.

Above all, I
was surprised at how receptive the students were to hearing me out. I
encountered a man who claims to have been wrongly accused and summarily fired. One
student agreed to post a flyer on the fraternity house wall. I also found a
student who was already under the impression that men and boys wrongly accused
of sexual misconduct were guilty until proven innocent, and another who had
been interested in a career in law and had already been looking into these
things.

At the end
of the video, you will see that when I explained to the surrounding students in
the Sam Rayburn Student Center that the deck was stacked against those who were
wrongly accused, a man playing pool exclaimed “Sounds good to me. Guilty!” I later
learned that this man was a staff member who I did not recognize as such because
he was dressed casually in a grey t-shirt. I did not see that the back of his
shirt was marked “STAFF” until I looked back over my shoulder when I was
approached by another staff member asking me to leave. While I was unable to
get his name (he was not wearing a name tag and I was unable to find his picture
on the university website), I did manage to catch him on video.

As chance
would have it I am also friends on Facebook with one of my former colleagues at
A&M-Commerce, who posted a picture of the flyer on his wall and said “So
someone handed this to my students before they entered class.” One of his
friends named Anne Phifer, a woman with Feminist sympathies who worked as a
secretary in the Department of Literature and Languages when I was an
instructor there, was among those who took exception to the flyers. It is a
possibility she may work there still. This is also on the video.

It is my
hope that others can learn from, use, and build upon these activism strategies.
This was definitely a positive experience for me. In particular, I was
surprised at how receptive and thankful a lot of students were. Part of this
may be due to my rhetorical approach. Before engaging students with the
material, I asked them if they had a minute. If they were busy or uninterested,
I wished them a good day and moved on. I kept the needs of the student central
to what I was saying, was concise whenever
possible out of respect for their time, and at the end asked them if they had
any questions, comments, or concerns. All this can be heard in the video. The
first five minutes is a recap for those on YouTube, but the rest is all new.